US Interest Rate History: 60+ Years of Treasury & Fed Rates

The basics

American interest rates have traveled from near zero to nearly 20% and back - this chart shows the whole journey.

The chart on this page is six decades of US interest rates, one line per Treasury maturity, updated every business day. The shape of the whole thing tells one big story. After World War II, rates were held low on purpose - the Federal Reserve kept the government's borrowing cost pinned down until a 1951 agreement (the Fed-Treasury Accord) set it free. Rates then climbed slowly through the 1950s and 60s, and in the 1970s inflation broke loose: two oil shocks and years of too-easy policy pushed prices - and rates - relentlessly higher.

The peak came in 1981. Fed chairman Paul Volcker, determined to kill inflation, pushed the federal funds rate to roughly 20%; the 10-year Treasury yield touched 15.8% that September, and a 30-year mortgage cost around 18%. It worked - inflation fell - and what followed was extraordinary: roughly four straight decades of falling rates, all the way to nearly zero. The 10-year yield bottomed near 0.5% in August 2020.

Then came the snap back. Post-pandemic inflation peaked at 9.1% in mid-2022, and the Fed answered with its fastest hiking campaign in forty years, taking its policy rate from zero to over 5% in about sixteen months. Everything on this chart - mortgages, savings rates, bond prices - moves in the gravity of that history.

Going deeper

Six eras, one chart: the Great Inflation, the Volcker squeeze, the 40-year bond bull, ZIRP, and the 2022 reset.

Read the chart as eras. 1962-1979: yields grind higher as inflation expectations become embedded - each cycle's low is higher than the last. 1979-1982: Volcker's monetarist experiment - the Fed targets money supply, lets the funds rate fly, and accepts back-to-back recessions as the price of credibility. 1982-2000: the great disinflation - falling inflation expectations power a two-decade bond bull market. 2000-2020: the decline continues but the driver changes - real rates fall as global savings pile up and estimates of the neutral rate (r*) slide; the funds rate sits at 0-0.25% from December 2008 to December 2015, and again from March 2020. 2022-present: the inflation burst and the reset to a world where cash yields something again.

The maturities tell different stories. The short end (3-month, 2-year) is essentially the Fed: it jumps in steps with policy and prices the next few meetings. The long end (10-year, 30-year) is the market's view of growth, inflation, and a term premium over decades - it moves earlier and less violently. Toggle the Fed Funds overlay on this page and watch the short end hug it while the long end anticipates it.

When the short end trades above the long end - an inverted curve - the market is saying policy is tight relative to the future it expects. The 2022-2024 inversion of the 10-year minus 2-year spread was the longest in the data. This site's yield-curve and inversion pages track that geometry live.

Advanced detail

Data lineage (CMT series from 1962), the nominal-vs-real decomposition, and why the 40-year bull was a regime, not a law.

What is actually plotted: Treasury constant-maturity (CMT) par yields via FRED - the official curve Treasury fits daily to on-the-run quotes. Series start at different times: the 10-year and 1-year in 1962, the 2-year in 1976, the 30-year in 1977 (with a gap in the 2000s when the long bond was discontinued), the 3-month bill series in the early 1980s. Lines on this chart start where their official data starts - nothing is backfilled.

Decompose the 1981-2020 decline and the story splits in two. Through the 1990s the drop is mostly falling INFLATION EXPECTATIONS - the nominal component. After 2000 it is increasingly falling REAL rates: demographics, the global savings glut, and a sliding r* - the real rate consistent with full employment and stable inflation. Term-premium estimates (e.g. the New York Fed's ACM model) went from several hundred basis points in the 1980s to around zero - at times negative - in the 2010s, which is why the long end could stay pinned even as deficits grew (the 2004-05 'Greenspan conundrum' was an early taste).

The practitioner's lesson from the full sweep: mean reversion in rates is regime-dependent. A model calibrated inside the 1982-2020 bull would have called every uptick a selling opportunity and been right for 40 years - then catastrophically wrong in 2022. Long histories like this one are the antidote: they contain the 1970s, when 'rates always come back down' failed for a decade. That is precisely why regulators' scenario sets (see the NAIC GOES pages here) force paths that revisit both tails.

US Treasury rates by year: annual averages, 1962–2026

Each figure is the average of that year's official daily closing yields for the maturity, from the Treasury constant-maturity series via FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data). A blank cell means the official series was not published that year (for example, the 30-year was discontinued 2002–2006 and the 1-month begins in 2001) — nothing here is estimated or backfilled. Values are percent per year.

*2026 is a partial year, averaged through October 22, 2026. For the day-by-day version of every series, see the interactive rate history chart.